Butler Shaffer: The Importance of Free Minds

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence
Butler Shaffer

The Importance of Free Minds

LouRockwell.com, May 4, 2012

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

~ United States Constitution, First Amendment

The above-quoted words reflect sentiments so essential to a condition of liberty that they are at the forefront of the history of American political thought. Jefferson’s quotation as well as the first of the listings in the so-called Bill of Rights, represent a theme carried over from the Revolutionary War period: minds should be free to explore and express whatever is of concern to them. If one reads the First Amendment closely, it becomes evident that this provision was intended to prohibit government intrusions upon the then-known means and settings for free thought.

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Tom Atlee: A New Co-Intelligence Initiative – Let’s Talk: Our New Economy

03 Economy, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence
Tom Atlee

A New Co-Intelligence Initiative: Let's Talk: Our New Economy

My intern Patrick Maxwell and CII president John Abbe have initiated a project I'm quite excited about. In high quality dialogue they plan to engage local people together about their personal concerns in today's rough economy – and then to expand the conversation to include how we could change our economic system and create innovations that would be more sustainable and satisfying. They'll include experts in the mix, but the main energy will come from the community itself.

They are starting with a 3-month pilot project to test the concept here in Eugene. They plan to share their learnings and potentially extend the project further in space and time. You can find out more about it in their note below.

I've been studying and writing about the emerging living economy for about 14 months – you'll be hearing more about that soon – and I am very excited with what I'm learning and where this initiative could go.

I invite you to support this ambitious experiment. Since it is being launched with a crowdfunding approach, even very small donations add tremendously to the momentum.

Thanks for any attention and support you give this. In the larger picture, I expect the return on your investment will be very good indeed.

Coheartedly,
Tom

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Dear friends of the Co-Intelligence Institute,

We are writing to alert you to an engaging new project from the CII.

For the next few months – and, if all goes well, for many months to come – board president John Abbe and intern Patrick Maxwell will be convening a series of dialogues here in CII's hometown of Eugene, Oregon, focused on our economy and its impact on local people's lives. Community members will explore questions like “How can I meet my needs with less money?” And “How do we create systems that work for us?”

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Bojan Radej: Data Journalism Handbook & Graphic Map

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, Media, Methods & Process
Bojan Radej

The Data Journalism Handbook is Out

6 months ago at Mozilla Festival 2011, the Data Journalism Handbook was born. Thanks for your interest in the book – I have great pleasure in announcing that the Handbook is now live!

The Handbook features contributions from over 70 leading practitioners of data journalism from every corner of the globe, from Japan to Finland, Nigeria to the US and from leading news outlets such the New York Times, Zeit Online, the BBC and the Guardian. The Handbook is an open educational resource, under a creative commons licence (CC-BY-SA) so please share it with your friends and remix it. We hope that it will encourage many budding data journalists to look at data as a source and give them courage to tackle it, as well as showcasing some great examples of journalism using data as inspiration for future stories.

You can find the handbook at: http://datajournalismhandbook.org/ 

Also available for pre-order is the e- and print version from O'Reilly Media – http://oreil.ly/ddj-e-print – so if you are interested in a version to read offline, take a look!

We will soon have the facility to submit feedback via the website if you spot any errors or have any improvements for the next version,


Lucy Chambers

Infographic impresario Lulu Pinney created this superb poster, which gives an overview of the contents of the Data Journalism Handbook.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Michel Bauwens: Knowing Networks as an Alternative to Closed Networks

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics
Michel Bauwens

Phi Beta Iota:  This is one of the most elegant trenchant discussions we have seen on the imperatives for arriving at collective intelligence through open methods.   The entire contribution is below the line.

Debating the Iron Law of Bureaucracy and the Power Law: Knowing Networks as an alternative to scale-free networks

Franco Iacomella, 2nd May 2012

These are further elements to the debate (between Zeynep Tufekci and others) as to whether and how the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, which affects initially egalitarian distributed networks, can be countered.

1. Clay Shirky: inequality is not always unfair

Classic discusion of how the power law operates in blogs, and why it is inevitable, by one of the most influential commentators, by Clay Shirky.

“A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we’ve seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.

Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.”

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Patrick Meier: Civil Resistance 2.0 – A New Database on Non-Violent Guerrilla Warfare

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics
Patrick Meier

Civil Resistance 2.0: A New Database on Non-Violent Guerrilla Warfare

Gene Sharp pioneered the study of nonviolent civil resistance. Some argue that his books were instrumental to the success of activists in a number of revolutions over the past 20 years ranging from the overthrow of Milosevic to ousting of Mubarak. Civil resistance has often been referred to as “nonviolent guerrilla warfare” and Sharp’s manual on “The Methods of Nonviolent Action,” for example, includes a list of 198 methods that activists can use to actively disrupt a repressive regime. These methods are divided into three sections: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention.

While Sharp’s 198 are still as relevant today as they were some 40 years ago, the technology space has changed radically. In Sharp’s “Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts” published in 2012, Gene writes that “a multitude of additional methods will be invented in the future that have characteristics of the three classes of methods: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention.” About four years ago, I began to think about how technology could extend Sharp’s methods and possibly generate entirely new methods as well. This blog post was my first attempt at thinking this through and while it was my intention to develop the ideas further for my dissertation, my academic focus shifted somewhat.

With the PhD out of the way, my colleague Mary Joyce suggested we launch a research project to explore how Sharp’s methods can and are being extended as a result of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The time was ripe for this kind of research so we spent the past few months building a database of civil resistance methods 2.0 based on Sharp’s original list. We also consulted a number of experts in the field to help us populate this online database. We decided not to restrict the focus of this research  to ICTs only–i.e., any type of technology qualifies, such as drones, for example.

This database will be an ongoing initiative and certainly a live document since we’ll be crowdsourcing further input. In laying the foundations for this database, we’ve realized once again just how important creativity is when thinking about civil resistance. Advances in technology and increasing access to technology provides fertile ground for the kind of creativity that is key to making civil resistance successful.

We invite you to contribute your creativity to this database and share the link (bit.ly/CivRes20) widely with your own networks. We’ve added some content, but there is still a long way to go. Please share any clever uses of technology that you’ve come across that have or could be applied to civil resistance by adding them.

Our goal is to provide activists with a go-to resource where they can browse through lists of technology-assisted methods to inform their own efforts. In the future, we envision taking the database a step further by considering what sequencing of said methods are most effective.

Phi Beta Iota:  We continue to believe that the fastest — and perhaps the only near-term and non-violent — means to restore the Republic and restore democracy as well as moral capitalism in the USA is an Electoral Reform Summit that demands of our two-party corrupt Congress the Electoral Reform Act of 2012.  Learn more at We the People Reform Coalition.

John Steiner: Tea Party & Occupy Finding Common Ground — Will They – And Independents and the Little Disenfranchised Parties – Converge in Time?

09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
John Steiner

This morning I got this note from Co-Intelligence Institute board member Lyn Manju Bazzell, who lives in Ashland, a town in southern Oregon's Rogue Valley:

“A little news from the Rogue Valley:  went to a meeting with 200 people last night.  It was a panel of 2 Tea Party leaders and 2 Occupy leaders in the Rogue Valley answering questions from the audience. A very positive move for our area!  Jeff Golden put it together with some help and there is a desire for ongoing conversations for the Rogue Valley. It is an outgrowth of one of  his Immense Possibilities episodes that included these 4 people. Yea for Jeff  – he's a mensch!

“Here are some areas of common ground that were shared by the panel:  Personal liberty issues; Homeland Security; Election reform – concern about voting machines; lobbying; self-reliance; importance of local action; concentration of power in the hands of the elites (a bit of difference re: who is really holding the power, with the Tea Party focused on government and Occupy on big business, but the identification of lobbying as an issues offers an open window into a deeper discussion; size of the military and our aggressive global orientation (this was a surprise to me for Tea Partiers).”

An hour later I received the following article from Lance Bisaccia:

Tea party, Occupy supporters find they have many similarities

Two groups come together at forum; avoid ‘hot debate'
By John Darling for the Tidings Posted: 2:00 AM April 24, 2012

In their first public outing together, tea party and Occupy backers — and an audience of 200 — found a lot of common ground on the issue that corporations, lobbyists, the military and the federal government have a huge amount of power, are “bought” — and aren't very responsive to the needs of the average person.

Yoda: Real-Time Crowd-Sourcing + Twitter Meta-RECAP

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

How to Perfect Real-Time Crowdsourcing

The new techniques behind instant crowdsourcing makes human intelligence available on demand for the first time.

One of the great goals of computer science is to embed human-like intelligence in common applications like image processing, robotic control and so on. Until recently the focus has been to develop an artificial intelligence that can do these jobs.

But there's another option: using real humans via some kind of crowdsourcing process. One well known example involves the CAPTCHA test which can identify humans from machines by asking them to identify words so badly distorted that automated systems cannot read them.

However, spammers are known to farm out these tasks to humans via crowdsourcing systems that pay in the region of 0.5 cents per 1000 words solved.

Might not a similar process work for legitimate tasks such as building human intelligence into real world applications?

The problem, of course, is latency. Nobody wants to sit around for 20 minutes while a worker with the skills to steer your robotic waiter is crowdsourced from the other side of the world.

So how quickly can a crowd be put into action.?That's the question tackled today by Michael Bernstein at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a few pals.

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